Michelle Teheux: What’s our problem? Pick a theory

So our federal debt is now so bad that Standard & Poor’s has actually downgraded us. That made me think about some of the theories of how we got into this fix.

Michelle Teheux

So our federal debt is now so bad that Standard & Poor’s has actually downgraded us. That made me think about some of the theories of how we got into this fix.

Theory No. 1 is that the federal government is full of idiots who can’t understand how to run a lemonade stand, let alone an entire country. If you favor this theory, you’re probably also in favor of making draconian cuts in taxes, on the theory that the government will just blow your dollars anyway. To heck with what this does to social programs — those folks are not your problem.

Theory No. 2 is that we’d be OK if we made corporations and our wealthiest citizens begin paying their fair share, instead of trying to run this country on the backs of the beleaguered middle class. The number of corporations that have been able to pay little or no taxes thanks to lucrative loopholes is drawing a lot of anger these days, but they’re not the only ones to take advantage of generous deductions of all sorts. A recent Associated Press story reports that the rich are now paying less than ever, and that nearly half of all U.S. households pay no federal income taxes at all. This leads us directly to the third theory.

Theory No. 3 is that our main problem is the huge number of Americans who are either unemployed or stuck in a low-paying job that doesn’t even allow them to support their families without help, let alone contribute to the running of the country at all. Many people who work full-time at low-paying jobs can only make it because they receive food stamps, medical cards, subsidized housing and day care, etc.

What would happen if we decided to set a minimum wage high enough that it would allow any worker to be able to afford to support himself without government help — and save tax dollars by no longer giving that now-un-needed help? For one thing, a fast-food burger would cost at least twice as much as it does now, but maybe that wouldn’t be the worst thing, would it?

There’s a tendency for some people to wonder why the heck poor people don’t just get better jobs. But which jobs would those be? I’ve heard the nation’s job market described as an hour glass, with lots of professional jobs at top and lots of minimum-wage jobs at the bottom, and very little in the middle. Not everyone is cut out to be a stockbroker or doctor or engineer. And nobody can support a family on minimum-wage-level jobs. We outsourced most of our manufacturing jobs to other countries, so good luck finding something in the middle.

Many’s the time I’ve felt disgusted at what I perceive as a lack of work ethic among younger people. But when I think about it, it’s easy to see how some of these folks might conclude that working hard doesn’t pay. Especially those who have been laid off, or who are working full-time but not living one bit better than their lazy brother-in-law whose family subsists on welfare.

But other than personal morals, just why should the lazy brother-in-law follow his hard-working relative’s example, when he can clearly see that working at any job he’s likely to be able to get won’t help his family live any better? That’s a question we really need to start asking. I’d feel a lot better about telling folks they need to solve their own problems and just work harder if we hadn’t pursued so many policies that have made it ever harder to find jobs that would allow them to do that.

I can’t help but think that the common thread in all of these theories is simply that we don’t have sufficient middle-class jobs. Re-import our jobs from overseas and we’ll have more people paying income taxes. We’ll have people see that working hard really can improve their family’s lives. We’ll have fewer people needing food stamps and medical cards and so forth to make it.

We’ll be right back to where we were a generation or two ago, which a lot of us think would be a pretty good place to be.

How do we get there? I’m hoping some of our best financial minds will turn their attention to this problem. Perhaps we can use the tax code to make it impossible for corporations to prosper via outsourcing jobs to other countries, or perhaps we could use tariffs to make imported goods much more expensive than those made here at home.

We’ll either figure it out or our children and grandchildren will look back on now as the good old days.

God forbid.

Michelle Teheux may be reached at mteheux@pekintimes.com.

The views expressed in this column are not necessarily those of the newspaper.

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